IT Industry Shellshocked in Q3: How to Plan for What's Next

Key Risk Indicators

Key risk indicators give a general breakout of the severity of actors (who was responsible for the attack), targeted assets (what the attacker was going after), impact (what happened) and practice (how attackers conducted the attack) as well as a look at social activity and incident volume (blue lines above). For IT in Q3, there was a high volume of uniquely reported cyber events and a similar volume of social media discussion related to these events. Perhaps most interesting, and potentially damaging, was how cyber criminals propagated attacks. The green line indicates practice, or how the hackers conducted their attack, and for August and early September, it's higher than normal. Let's dig deeper into this…

Knowing how much budget and what resources to allocate to cybersecurity is no easy task. How much security is needed? Where can the expenditure be most effective? Where is my best ROI? While this has traditionally been left to security professionals to make the business case, ownership of cybersecurity efforts and risk mitigation is starting to shift to the C-suite as recent high-profile breaches have shown a major impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, stock price, jobs, and an organization's bottom line finances.

Making the right investments can minimize the cyber risks your organization faces, but this requires looking at the complete picture and not just a few pieces. Often, a key missing piece of the puzzle is an understanding of what cyber events are occurring in your industry. Who's getting hit by whom? What methods are being used to carry out an attack? What's being targeted? What's the impact? And what should you do to limit the cyber risk to your organization?

Armed with this information, you can look at the cyber problems trending in your space and allocate resources accordingly, ultimately giving you a competitive advantage. Take the IT industry, for example. In this slideshow, Jason Polancich, founder, chief architect, SurfWatch Labs, looks at the risks prevalent in Q3 and how a typical budget stacks up.

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